In comparison to some of his scrape-prone brothers, Ryan Brunn did little to brand himself as a troublemaker.
“He was always polite. He never spoke without saying yes sir or no sir,” said Don Allen, headmaster at War Hill Christian Academy in Dawsonville. Brunn, who was home schooled, did not attend War Hill, but five years ago he played on the school's football and basketball team.
On his Facebook page, Brunn was full of foul language and adolescent swagger.
Who he was beneath those contrasting public faces, few outside his family may know -- and none of them were present Thursday when Brunn made his first appearance Cherokee County Superior Court, charged with the murder of 7-year-old Jorelys Rivera of Canton.
Brunn, wearing an orange jail suit, a bulletproof vest and shackles, sat beside two court-appointed public defenders. After glancing around the courtroom, the 20-year-old suspect showed little emotion as charges were read against him. At one point, he hung his head. When asked about his education level, Brunn told Judge Frank Mills that he had completed the 10th grade.
Only a few minutes later, deputies escorted Brunn out of the courtroom and back to the county's jail, where he is being held in isolation without bond.
"He's separated from other inmates," Lt. Jay Baker with the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office said after the hearing.
Brunn's next court appearance is expected in January.
According to his Facebook page, Brunn lived with his mother until early November, when he moved to the River Ridge complex in Canton. “He looked forward to moving out on his own," said E.J. Young, who used to play basketball with Brunn. "There’s not much to do here” in Dahlonega.
Ryan and his four brothers were foster children, according to documents their mother, Karen Whiteley, submitted Dec. 2 as part of a bankruptcy filing. That was also the day that, according to police, Brunn beat, raped and stabbed Jorelys in a vacant apartment in the complex where he had recently started work as a groundskeeper.
The meager picture that emerges in Dahlonega is of a family under stress. In the bankruptcy filing, Whiteley listed her sole income over the past three years as child support and an "adoption stipend" received from the state of New York, where the family lived before coming to Georgia. In 2009 and 2010, the stipend came to $48,000; this year it was $40,000.
Two months ago, the family left the home Whiteley owned in Dahlonega and moved to another house. Thursday, no one answered the phone number listed under her name.
"My mom is doing all right," Ryan's brother Steven told Channel 2 Action News. "She's still in shock. She cannot believe that her son would do this, and she sticks to her story right now and believes he did not do this."
Various other family members also insisted via social media sites that Brunn is innocent and that police have rushed to judgement.
Ryan has no prior criminal record, according to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Both Steven and another brother, Connor, do. When Connor was 18 in 2009, he was charged with theft by taking and theft by deception. When Steven was 24 in 2009, he was charged with shoplifting.
Steven told Channel 2 that Whiteley moved the family to Georgia in search of a better life. “We moved up here thinking it would be better,” Steven said. “But moving to Georgia has been a nightmare.”
He said he was talking to Ryan on the phone shortly before he was arrested.
“He just told me he had to go, he had to go. The next thing I knew I looked at the TV and he was being handcuffed,” Steven said.
Allen, the headmaster at War Hill, said that unlike many of the home-school parents, who want to be very involved in their child’s activities, Brunn’s parents were rarely if ever seen at school games.
He said Brunn briefly dated a girl who attended the school. He said the girl was a popular student whose family are very involved in the church of which the school is a part. He said the girl's parents contacted him after Brunn's arrest to say how shocked they were by the news. The girl has posted on her Facebook page that she is also surprised.
Jorelys' death has also cast an unwelcome spotlight on her family.
State child protection authorities removed Jorelys' two younger sisters from the home after she disappeared on Dec. 2 but returned them to the family following a hearing Thursday.
Documents from the Division of Family and Children Services reveal that the mother, identified by a family attorney as Joselinne Rivera, was investigated several months ago for improper supervision of the children.
On at least two occasions, Jorelys was temporarily missing after school and found at a neighbor's house. School officials and her mother disagreed over whether the mother had been present to greet her daughter as she got off the school bus. On one of those occasions, Jorelys later told school officials her mother had been “too sick” to get her at the stop.
Then, in February, Jorelys once again had no one to meet her at the bus stop, and the driver took her back to the school, according to the report. The incident prompted someone from her school to contact DFCS.
A case manager who visited the home found no signs of abuse and a safety plan was written.
The report also reveals that after Jorelys vanished, police were frustrated because no one in the home could tell them much about her playmates or where she played.
When the case manager arrived Saturday to see the other children and examine the apartment, neighbors volunteered concerns that the children regularly went unsupervised. DFCS subsequently decided to temporarily remove the two younger girls, a separation that lasted until Thursday's hearing.
"They're going home with their parents," attorney John Connolly said Thursday after the ruling that they should be returned. "The family is very pleased."
David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center, said people often place too much emphasis on any parental lapse by the parents of children who fall victim to tragedy.
“It’s easy for us to think, well, she didn’t supervise her child. I supervise my child. It won’t happen to me,” he said. “We reassure ourselves of that, but it’s not necessarily that this was a failure of supervision. … Trying to supervise our children 24/7 is just not possible.”
“It’s very hard to accept that these things happen," he said, "that there are people in society disordered enough to do this kind of thing, and that some unfortunate random child might be the victim."
Staff writers Alexis Stevens and Bill Torpy contributed to this report.
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